Ringcaps
Ringcaps are small, good mushrooms that come up in rings in grassland, from a few paces across to wide enough to hold a cottage. They are gathered and eaten everywhere, and the rings are feared everywhere: nearly every people says a ring is a thin place to the Veil and steps around it rather than through.
Appearance
A ringcap is a small mushroom with a tough, bell-shaped cap the size of a thumbnail to a coin, buff to pale tan and darker at the centre, on a thin, wiry stem that bends without breaking. The gills are widely spaced and cream. They come up after rain in a ring or an arc in the grass, and the ring shows even when no caps are up: a band of dark, lush grass, with a band of withered or bare ground inside it. Fresh caps smell pleasantly of almonds or new-cut hay, and they dry well.
Habitat and Range
They grow in short grass wherever it is grazed or mown: village greens, pasture, hill meadows, the turf of old earthworks, and the grassy edges of woods, across the cradle-web and the far side.
Behaviour and Temperament
A ring grows outwards a little every year from where it began, so old rings are wide, and two rings that meet do not cross but open into one another. Some rings in old turf are reckoned older than the village beside them.
Life Cycle
The fungus lives as threads in the soil, spreading outward and dying behind, and puts up caps at the growing edge in late spring and again in autumn after rain. The withered band inside a ring is where the threads crowd and starve the grass.
Uses and Dangers
The caps are good fresh in a stew and better dried for winter, and children are sent to pick the ring’s edge. They have poor lookalikes, small white mushrooms of the same meadows that sicken the stomach, and a careless picker takes both. The rings harm nothing.
Lore and Belief
The belief is old and widespread: a ring is a door left ajar, and whoever steps inside may wander and not come back, or come back with lost time. Herders turn flocks around a ring, a child who falls asleep in one is fetched out by the ankles, and travellers keep to a path that skirts it. Some say the dead dance in rings at night, others that the Veil’s own drifters do. Thin places are real, and the Veil does respond to a traveller’s intent and lack of it; but the rings are the work of the fungus in the soil, and no known ring is thinner than the meadow around it. The fear does no harm, and in most villages the caps are picked from the outside of the ring only.
That does not stop the tales: the shepherd who stepped into a ring and came back seven years later with a pocket full of gold that turned to leaves, and the bride who danced in one on her wedding night and was never seen again.